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‘Power Plants’: renewable energy from photosynthesis

28th Mar 2017

A blog post by Barney Slater AMRSB, BBSRC PhD student at University of Cambridge and policy intern at the Royal Society of Biology, talks about renewable energy from photosynthesis.

The need for renewable energy will only increase as our global supplies of fossil fuels begin to run dry. One of the most famous examples of renewable energy is solar power. Solar panels typically use expensive light-sensitive semiconducting materials like silicon to convert sunlight into electricity. However, biologists teaming up with engineers have been working on an equivalent solar semiconductor system, one already utilised by living things: photosynthesis.